A Spectre Haunting Bank of England
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Mass job losses caused by advancing technology could lead to a rise of Marxism, the governor of the Bank of England has warned. Mark Carney said the automation of millions of jobs could lead to mass unemployment, wage stagnation and the growth of communism within a generation.
He warned “Marx and Engels may again become relevant.” He said: “The benefits, from a worker’s perspective, from the first industrial revolution, which began in the latter half of the 18th century, were not felt fully in productivity and wages until the latter half of the 19th century. If you substitute platforms for textile mills, machine learning for steam engines, Twitter for the telegraph, you have exactly the same dynamics as existed 150 years ago – when Karl Marx was scribbling the Communist Manifesto.”
"… machines are increasingly able to problem-solve, and ‘learn’, independently; and are able to perform an expanding range of both physical and mental tasks better and more cheaply than we can. Under these conditions, automation could emancipate or immiserate. Managed well, automation could build a future of shared economic plenty, the productivity gains of technological change allowing us all to live better and more freely. Managed poorly, automation could create a ‘paradox of plenty’, in which we produce more, yet the fruits are less equally shared, as the benefits of technological change flow to the owners of capital…The future is not technologically determined. Automation is not an external force acting on us, but something shaped by our collective choices, with public policy powerfully steering how technologies are developed, used, and for whose benefit…. if automation is to underpin a future of shared prosperity, we urgently need to develop new models of collective ownership. As automation grows, ‘Who owns the robots?’ becomes a vital determinant of the distribution of prosperity. …Carney was right to highlight Marx and Engels as useful guides to an age of automation. When considering the divergent paths deep technological change is opening up – a world where technologies are managed and owned to our collective advancement against one where they deepen inequalities of power and reward – we have one political choice confronting us: socialism or barbarism.."
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Carney (or his speech writer) obviously likes the phrase about Marx scribbling as he's used it before, albeit with reference to Capital rather than the Communist Manifesto:http://uk.businessinsider.com/bank-of-england-governor-mark-carney-britain-lost-decade-2016-12Still, interesting that he should frequently be referencing Marx.
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